Hacker News Reader

Comment by havblue | Hacker News Reader

An unfortunate thing about Morrowind for me is the "you can never go home" effect. Fans can always remaster it with better graphics, but the strangeness and beauty of playing it for the first time is something that we won't get to experience again.

View on HN

There's a recurring joke in the Morrowind community that the best way to play it is by hurting yourself enough to get amnesia and then playing it.

I know by now my favorite play style (Dark Elf, long sword, heavy armor, destruction magic). But I need to branch out to try something else, but then I won't be playing my favorite way! Magic in particular is pretty difficult to work with in this game.

I still remember discovering the mushroom buildings of Seyda Neen.

For me it was always about the meta game. The alchemy loop was fun to find once, but then so broken as to be boring. The enchanting system was so rediculously powerful that it made everything trivial, but somehow in a fun way. Always on levitation, spell reflection, and spells that could literally annihilate anyone outdoors as I flew into a city apocalypse-style and cast once and everyone fell down.

The jump spell for travel was fun as well as long as you don't jump as high as the yellow fur hat guy at the start.

These sorta broken systems were a bit part of the charm of the game :)

I remember a mission where I had to visit Tel Branora, a Telvanni tower (I think it was the beginning of the quest line to become head of House Telvanni).

As it happened, the weather was foggy, so I got quite close to the tower before it suddenly loomed up out of the fog in front of me. I've never been quite so stunned by anything in a game before or since.

Huh, I only played like an hour of Morrowind. Giant fleas and I found some boots that made me jump into the air and die. Maybe I should try it. I beat Skyrim and Oblivion, it's just hard with the graphics and I feel like I've been waiting on Skywind or whatever that mod is called.

> and I found some boots that made me jump into the air and die

You're probably the first person I've ever seen to have confused the Scroll of Icarian Flight with the Boots of Blinding Speed. ;)

FWIW, the modern graphics mods improve every texture, the draw distance, and atmospheric effects. Some of the game play like how a sword can look like it hit, but did not, are more of an obstacle I think.

there are no mushroom buildings in seyda neen. youre thinking of Aldruhn

I thought Aldruhn was made of giant bug shells? Sadrith Mora has the Telvanni Council which is in a living building same as any of the Telvanni towers in the east: Tel Mora, Tel Aruhn, etc.

https://en.uesp.net/maps/mwmap/mwmap.shtml

Oops I'm thinking of Sadrith Mora! Aldruhn has the giant crab shell building.

ah, my correction stands corrected. It is definitely Sadrith Mora (along with pretty much every other Telvanni town).

Agreed. Mind boggling experience that I've never been able to replicate after the first genuine play-through. Granted I was young and Fable more or less had a great impact on me as well.

Games feel...not as great as before. Ghost of Tsushima was excellent but it's been a while since a game has truly made me go, "Whoa!"

Souls series is probably exemplary of an "okay, I'm a kid again" game for me. It's just so left field in many ways yet familiar. Souls makes me nostalgic about my gaming past that is not even historically accurate, they are so weird.

A large part of that is the draw distance.

Play the game with the original view distance, and the island feels enormous, mysterious, full of possibility.

Turn up the draw distance, and you realize that Pelagiad is closer to Balmora than my house is to the corner store.

I would love to play a Morrowind successor with a modern engine, maybe not a total remake, but further along in the storyline of Tamriel. I just want to revisit a lot of those places I used to go to with the same type of rich detail of Skyrim and Oblivion (for its time).

Aside: I would love to see the other regions in Nirn someday as well. We've yet to see anything beyond Tamriel in the modern games, and there are even other races / species we have yet seen which could make for a really interesting game if done correctly.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Nirn

Edit:

If they do a Morrowind Sequel or Prequel they need to be careful not to overlook even minor details, unless they go far enough forward / backward to where most things are ignored, but I would say even check the books and the quests of the game to make sure nothing is amiss.

I suppose the problem is that it seems like Bethesda is more interested in creating a sandbox then having a story that fits that sandbox. Going back to Morrowind doesn't accomplish that necessarily.

On the story front I think what it did well was have the lore tie into weird things about the game world. The sand storm, the blight, the floating rock are things that dagoth did on purpose. Likewise, vivec and company are "Gods", that you can meet, but they're also Dunmer who used artifacts to become immortal who knew you in a past life. The visuals are more tangible because the story is integrated into what you see.

Morrowind has a some interesting lore but is the textbook definition of a 'fetch quest' game. I'm not sure I can even remember the plot of any of the missions. Their modern games, while often hackneyed in the writing dept are at least diverting to your attention. "Wouldn't it be cool if a mage dropped from the sky" is probably the high bar of Morrowind narrative chops.

Bethesda is culturally a "level design developer" imo. Kind of like Valve in that regard. They have a technical idea of what they want the player to experience, not a strong narrative one. New Vegas is so interesting because Obsidian clearly do not have the same culture, it was ALL traditional RPG storytelling (and some okayish levels) in the same Bethesda framework.

They did in Elder Scrolls Online. I didn't play that much of it but it's from an earlier time period than in the normal TES Morrowind. It was fun for the sightseeing at least.

The problem with ESO is it's moreso an MMO and less like playing any TES game. I have played it a little bit but its not as immersive as regular TES games feel.

These games are weird and have a bizarrely long shelf life that is often (unfairly in my view) thrashed in the gaming consciousness.

All of the games have this half life where you love it for the first 60 hours, enjoy for another 100 hours of modding and then you are sort of disgusted by the realization that NO game can really sustain this level of scrutiny and you see all the seams, copy-paste that such a diverse world needs.

The Outer Worlds was undoubtably an attempt to mimic the style of Bethesda but I honestly couldn't play more than 30-40 hours of it. Even New Vegas, my favourite in that engine, doesn't have enough of the repetitive grind that really makes these games so unbelievably popular.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com